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Five Musical Numbers for When You’re Struggling

A rousing song might not fix everything. But, then again, you don’t know until you try.

Zach J. Payne
5 min readMay 16, 2019

There’s something about the world of a musical that always makes things better. From the second that the house lights dim, you can — if you’re lucky — be swept away into a completely different world.

Theatre is magic, and I love experiencing it from both the stage and the house. I know that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I do wish people would give it a shot.

One of the most common complaints that I hear is that It’s so unrealistic, that people just randomly start singing and dancing out of nowhere. But one of the first things that I learned in my first musical theatre class is that it’s not out of nowhere. There’s a mantra: “When your character feels too much for words to be enough, they sing; when they feel too much for song to be enough, they dance.”

As someone who keeps their feelings relatively bound up (until I start ranting on the internet, but nevermind that), there’s something freeing about giving in to the full depth of emotion: to immerse yourself in a world of people who openly express what’s on their heart: whether it’s pure joy, pain, or anything else on the multi-axial emotional spectrum.

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Zach J. Payne
Zach J. Payne

Written by Zach J. Payne

(He/They) Poet. Thespian. YA Novelist.

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